Support multiple composed annotations on a single annotated element [SPR-13486]

[spring-projects-issues]

Sam Brannen opened SPR-13486 and commented

Status Quo

The findMergedAnnotation*(...) and getMergedAnnotation*(...) methods in AnnotatedElementUtils only support a single target annotation and therefore a single composed annotation.

However, there are certain scenarios for which it would be beneficial to retrieve multiple composed annotations on a single annotated element. As a concrete example, see #18054 which requests support for @Cacheable, @CacheEvict, and CachePut as merged composed annotations.

Deliverables

1. Introduce support in AnnotatedElementUtils for processing multiple composed annotations above a single annotated element.

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Affects: 4.2 GA

Issue Links:

• Support @Cache* as merged composed annotations [SPR-13475] #18054 Support @Cache* as merged composed annotations ("is depended on by")
• Support repeatable annotations as composed annotations [SPR-13973] #18545 Support repeatable annotations as composed annotations

[spring-projects-issues]

Sam Brannen commented

Completed as described in the comments for GitHub commit a5139f3:

Support searches for multiple merged composed annotations

Prior to this commit it was possible to search for the 1st merged
annotation above an annotated element. It was also possible to search
for annotation attributes aggregated from all annotations above an
annotated element; however, it was impossible to search for all
composed annotations above an annotated element and have the results as
synthesized merged annotations instead of a multi-map of attributes.

This commit introduces a new findAllMergedAnnotations() method in
AnnotatedElementUtils that finds all annotations of the specified type
within the annotation hierarchy above the supplied element. For each
such annotation found, it merges that annotation's attributes with
matching attributes from annotations in lower levels of the annotation
hierarchy and synthesizes the results back into an annotation of the
specified type. All such merged annotations are collected and returned
as a set.

[spring-projects-issues]

Sam Brannen commented

Reopening in order to introduce a getAllMergedAnnotations() method in AnnotatedElementUtils that searches using get semantics.

[spring-projects-issues]

Sam Brannen commented

Added support for "get" search semantics in 1ec35e9